Reminder: Din Maia Hin is basically the only dragon left in Zaiapan after Darumatha caused them all to attack one-another back in chapter 17.

*

So I was just looking at page 2 of Broken Space, my first comic, and something funny struck me: though the page betrays no understanding of perspective or architectural planning, the curves on that bridge still looking pretty good. That’s because I drew the page manually with Microns on a piece of Bristol board and scanned it in. I got a Wacom tablet about halfway through Broken Space, and while you can detect a noticeable improvement in line quality, my irregular curves were never quite as good.

A French curve is a wonderful piece of plastic with different degrees of curvature: you slide it around the page until you find the curve you want, and once you’ve found what you need it’s as easy as drawing a straight line with a ruler. By contrast, Photoshop uses an arcane and (to me, at least) mostly impenetrable “pen” system that’s supposed to allow you to draw all kinds of curves but usually ends up producing a godawful mess. I use the Pen tool by rote to create the pointers of my word balloons, but I’ve never mastered the trick of re-creating the French curve.